In his most extensive public comments since becoming Google’s (GOOG) CEO, Larry Page on Thursday delivered a carefully crafted response to critics who say the company is too free-spending, too unfocused and too aloof to investors and Wall Street.

From 3,000 miles away, it was almost possible to hear the cheers coming from Wall Street, where Google’s stock has declined by nearly $100 a share in the four months since company co-founder Page took over. Speaking at the company’s annual shareholder meeting at its Mountain View headquarters, Page affirmed his focus on fiscal discipline, lauded Google’s successes with Android smartphones, display advertising and its Chrome Web browser, and defended the company’s forays into unproven technology like driverless cars as necessary to not “choke innovation.”

Dressed in a conservative blue blazer, Page delivered a speech that might have lacked the polish of a Steve Jobs or the drumbeat precision of a Mark Zuckerberg. But, glancing down frequently at his notes while mostly maintaining eye contact with his audience, Page hit the necessary notes and fielded the lion’s share of shareholder questions with a smile as former CEO Eric Schmidt for the most part stood off quietly to the side.

“I do want to reiterate to you: We are very careful stewards of shareholder money,” Page said at one point. “We started as a startup in a garage, and we are very, very careful about our spending. I was scared to hire an office manager because I thought it was too expensive. So we have that culture and that history, and we’re very committed to that.”

Words like that had to be catnip for Wall Street. Page made only a perfunctory appearance as Google reported its first-quarter financial results in April, and failed to address Wall Street’s concerns about Google’s jump in spending as it bestowed a 10 percent pay raise on all workers and launched what is expected to be the most aggressive hiring year in its history. The next day, Google’s stock plummeted nearly $48, or 8 percent.

That decline was the worst day for Google’s stock in a dismal four-month run that has seen a 16 percent, or $99, decline in the company’s stock price since the Jan. 20 announcement that Page would replace Schmidt as Google’s CEO. Google stock closed at $528.06 Thursday. The stock has sagged even as Android has become the leading U.S. smartphone operating system, amid estimates that Google might command as much as 97 percent of the mobile search market, and even as the valuations of rivals ranging from LinkedIn and Facebook to the Russian search engine Yandex have soared.

Analysts who follow Google said in interviews this week that Wall Street is antsy with Page’s apparent indifference to telling the company’s story to investors and others. That, they said, is allowing criticism to take root that Google is too free-spending, and too scattered in its focus because of its infatuation with futuristic technology. As Google’s shareholders convened Thursday at the Googleplex, the big question for many analysts was whether Page would take the time to come and answer those critics.

His appearance may quiet the din.

“The sentiment on the (Google) name is as bad as we’ve ever seen it in covering the stock. There is a huge swath of investors who know nothing about Larry,” said Ben Schachter, an analyst with Macquarie Securities who released a note Thursday praising the success of Android and Chrome, and who has set a bullish $725 price target on Google stock. “We think the company is sort of missing an opportunity here to communicate what its strategy is. … We think that is definitely an overhang for the stock.”

Scott Kessler, an analyst with Standard & Poor’s, said that when New York financial analysts flew out to Silicon Valley for a daylong briefing at Yahoo (YHOO) last week, the buzz was why Google couldn’t do the same.

Analysts want to see the CEO and other executives “in the flesh. They want to have the chance to interact with them, look them in the eyes, hear the tones of their voices,” Kessler said. “It’s not lost on us that it just seems like other large-cap Internet companies in the Bay Area have been doing analyst meetings and they have been doing them very successfully.”

Page took pains to stress several times that Google remains focused on its core businesses of Internet search and advertising, projecting a slide of himself and co-founder Sergey Brin in a Google driverless car, while saying shareholders should not read press reports about such futuristic technology and assume a large share of Google’s resources are going to those efforts.

For the media, “it’s much more interesting — what is the latest crazy thing that Google did,” Page said. “It tends to be like three people in the company, keep that in mind. We are not betting the farm on a lot of those things. That’s not what we are doing.”

Still, Page said, now-crucial products like Android and Chrome started off as technological long-shots, and there were few hostile questions from the roughly 250 shareholders who attended the annual meeting.

“We don’t want to choke innovation. We want to make sure we have a lot of things going on at the company that are maybe speculative,” Page said, quickly adding, “we spend the vast majority of our resources on our core businesses, which are search and advertising. … That’s our core focus.”

Contact Mike Swift at 408-271-3648. Follow him at Twitter.com/swiftstories.